The 1.76M POL is the amount of POL given to the teams (not including the overhead cost). Which is about the same design for this proposal, the only difference is 10 teams instead of 8, the Polygon season 1 round had the same $250k Matching Pool and $50k to launch each bonding curve, and $5k for each Arb Bot.
There are 2 main reasons we chose 10 teams for this round. #1 to keep the overhead low, the overhead is 24% here. Our first draft of this proposal was for 2 seasons and 30 teams which had the overhead at 18%, but the initial feedback from Raam and others that we discussed with was to reduce the budget. So we thought 10 was a happy medium.
#2 The more teams in the q/acc round, the more network effects. I have run a dozen QF rounds and there is a clear correlation between the number of teams participating and the overall activity of the round. Imagine, each team brings an average of 30 supporters… and then each supporter buys tokens on an average of 3 teams… and you can see how exponential the math is. More teams = better!
That said, we can reduce the number of teams more, but it will definitely increase the overhead as a % of the grant, as the deployment costs are hard to reduce.